Friday, February 28, 2014

Caterina Cruz has no home. No loyalties. No objection to exacting torturous revenge. Her life’s mission is to destroy the terrorist who murdered her family. Then she steps into an elaborate game of charades alongside a Titan Group operative posing as an arms dealer—and her newlywed husband. The sexy distraction may be more than she can handle.
Attacked with a psychedelic drug weeks before, Rocco Savage is plagued with hallucinations that threaten his new rank as Titan’s second-in-command. No one knows and he wants to keep it that way.

Throwing him further off his game, he now has a wife with her own secrets he can’t crack and an agenda he can’t control.
Their mission—an elaborate deception of heated glances and passionate kisses—spins out of control. With Rocco's mind already compromised, can he keep his secret and his distance? And with Caterina's tragic past controlling her every move, can she keep the con up long enough to secure her revenge? Or will both go down in flames?

Can you give us a
brief overview of your latest book? Is it part of a series?

Savage Secrets is the 6th title in the Titan series though each book can
be read as a standalone. Rocco Savage and Caterina Cruz partner to take down a
terrorist, but each have their own reasons for wanting to succeed. Rocco needs
to prove that he was the right choice for a promotion within Titan. Caterina
needs to avenge her family’s massacre. Both have internal demons that bring
them to the point of disaster.

Do you have a favorite
character?

I’ve
loved Cash Garrison in every book. But, I have to admit, that Rocco Savage has
stolen my heart. It surprised me. I love all my characters, hero, heroine, and
secondary, but Cash has always had a special place for some reason. But Cash
being Cash has graciously stepped aside to let his buddy rock out the top spot.
So, I adore Rocco for no other reason than Roc loves Cat in a deep, intense
way, flaws and all.

Have you ever had a
minor character evolve into a major one? Did that change the direction of the
novel at all?

Brock was
always supposed to be a minor character. But then he went and did something
crazy in book #3, Westin’s Chase. I had to write his novella. It’s called
Gambled. And I still get tons of emails about him. I wouldn’t be surprised if
he keeps showing up in a major way as the series progresses. But then again,
IDK. Brock’s always pulling fast ones on me.

What factors
influenced your decision to self-publish your book(s)?

I like
the control aspect. Before I decided to publish, I was waiting for others, on
their schedules. When someone left a job, I was left dangling. When someone
went on vacation, my career was put on hold. It didn’t work for me. Then I
started to study the industry and watch some good friends with bad deals. It
made my heart hurt for them. So while I was mulling all these things over, I
went to the RWA conference, took the self-publishing track and it rocked my
world. I highly suggest buying and listening to the recordings. They aren’t
cheap, but I attribute much of my success to strategies and tactics I picked up
in those workshops.

Do you outline your
story or just go where your muse takes you?

Ha. I’d
love to outline. I’ve tried. But it turns into a joke. I’m an absolute fly by
the seat of my pants pantser. I tried an outline (again) recently. It literally
read: birthday party, pool scene, love, sex, dark moment. That’s not an
outline. That’s a shopping list of plot points.

Did you hire an
editor to review your manuscript before publishing?

Yes, I
hire an editorial team. I’ve learned a lot since the first book was edited. But
now, I’m most comfortable with a process of crit partners, beta readers, an
editor and a proofreader.

What have you’ve
learned during your self-publishing journey?

Smile and
ignore the one star reviews. I’d say don’t read any of them, but really? Who’s
going to do that when you first start? My favorite one star review bashes one
of my favorite sentences EVER. So it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Also, don’t
forget this is a business. Write content. Don’t shy away from advertising. But
don’t spend money you don’t have with a survival plan.

Besides Amazon, are
there any other sites where your books are for sale?

Barnes
& Noble, Kobo, iBook, Google Play, and All Romance

Do you find it
difficult to juggle your time between marketing your current book and writing
your next book?

Yes, it’s
easy to fall into the easy trap of FB and twitter. Character interviews and
take overs are time consuming. They have their benefits, but moderation is key.
Leading up to the Savage Secrets release, the only writing I’ve done is promo.
I love it and it is worth it, but it certainly doesn’t write the next book.

What advice would you
give a new author just entering into the self-publishing arena?

Know your
business, understand the industry. It’s hard to stay afloat on every topic, all
the time, but it’s worth your time to know what’s happening out there. Also,
forget about marketing and social media. The return on your investment of time
isn’t worth it unless you have three or more books to sell. Instead, write.
Write, write, write. Content is king. But, make sure the content is
well-structured and well-edited.

What’s next for you?

Sweet Girl is the prequel to Garrison’s
Creed. Then after that I’m writing Roman and Parker’s books.

Book Blurb:Meet the brave and fearless Visola; a woman unlike any you've ever
encountered. Her wit and humor take her through the darkest of dangers
with a smile always on her face--and her
smile only grows larger as the odds become more impossible. With no
concern for her own safety, Visola dives headfirst into the throes of
battle to protect the people and country she loves, even if it means
facing her worst enemy--the one man who can get inside her head and
break her down like no other: her own husband...

There is no divorce in the undersea kingdom of Adlivun. Marriage is a bond that lasts until death--even
if death comes in several centuries, and your spouse happens to become a
ruthless, vicious adversary. This is the conflict that General Visola
Ramaris faces when she learns that the mighty Vachlan is behind the
attacks on her kingdom. She has sworn to protect Adlivun with her life,
but long ago, she also swore to love and honor her husband...

Visola
must choose whether she will destroy Vachlan once and for all, or
attempt the hardest thing conceivable: communication. After two hundred
years of desertion, she knows she can never forgive him. When he
threatens the person dearest to her, she must take action. Confronting
Vachlan on enemy territory would be nothing short of suicide. She knows
that if she falls into his custody, the deranged mercenary would relish
torturing her and making her lose her own sanity.

Author bio:
Nadia Scrieva lives in Toronto, Canada with no husband, no kids, and
no pets. She does own a very attractive houseplant which she
occasionally remembers to water between her all-consuming writing
marathons.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Special sale price of only $0.99!
Together these books have over 650 five star reviews!

Read these bestselling tales of
survival against the odds, dark worlds, dystopian regimes and heroic rebels.

Shattered Worlds features six
full-length novels from bestselling authors. Immerse yourself in
post-apocalyptic civilizations and bleak near-futures where hope still lives.

New York Times and USA Today
bestselling author Elle Casey – Apocalypsis Book 1: Kahayatle

My name's Bryn Mathis. I'm seventeen
years old, and I live in a neighborhood outside of Orlando, Florida. I live
alone because my dad died almost a year ago, along with all the other adults in
the world. I'm almost out of food and the gangs of kids that roam around my
town are getting more vicious by the day. It's time for me to leave and find
another place to live ... a place where I can find food and shelter ... a place
where they won't be able to find me. Alone, it might have been possible; but
now I've got company. I'm worried that I don't have what it takes to get from
here to my final destination. And I have no idea what might be waiting for me
when I get there.

Elle Casey is a full-time writer of
New Adult and Young Adult titles in several genres, including romance, urban
fantasy, sci-fi dystopian, and action-adventure. She's an American girl who's
been living in southern France with her husband and three children since 2010.
She loves chatting with her readers, so feel free to drop her a line.

Shalini lives in Dorset, England
with her husband and two noisy boys. Before children, she was signed to
Universal Music as a singer songwriter. Now, writing novels has hijacked her
life and she is usually to be found with a laptop welded to her fingers and the
house in a permanent state of neglect. Find Shalini at: http://www.shaliniboland.co.uk

Zoe Cannon

Zoe Cannon writes about the things
that fascinate her: outsiders, societies no sane person would want to live in,
questions with no easy answers, and the inner workings of the mind. If she
couldn't be a writer, she would probably be a psychologist, a penniless
philosopher, or a hermit in a cave somewhere. While she'll read anything that
isn't nailed down, she considers herself a YA reader and writer at heart. She
lives in New Hampshire with her husband and a giant teddy bear of a dog, and
spends entirely too much time on the internet. Find Zoe at:http://www.zoecannon.com

Scott
Cramer

Scott Cramer has written feature
articles for national magazines, covered school committee meetings for a local
newspaper, published haiku and poetry, optioned a screenplay, and worked in
high-tech marketing communications. His pursuit of a good story has put him
behind the stick of an F-18, flying a Navy Blue Angels' fighter jet, and he has
trekked through the Peruvian mountains in search of an ancient Quechua festival
featuring a condor. Scott and his wife have two daughters and reside outside
Lowell, Massachusetts (birthplace of Jack Kerouac) in an empty
nest/zoo/suburban farm/art studio with too many surfboards in the garage. Find
Scott at: http://www.facebook.com/authorscottcramer

Sarah
Dalton

Sarah grew up in the middle of
nowhere in the countryside of Derbyshire and as a result has an over-active
imagination. She has been an avid reader for most of her life, taking
inspiration from the stories she read as a child, and the novels she devoured
as an adult.

She is the author of the popular YA
dystopia series 'Blemished' and the gothic novella 'My Daylight Monsters'. She
is currently working on a YA Fantasy series titled 'White Hart'. Find Sarah at:
http://sarahdaltonbooks.com/

Katie
French

Katie French imagined herself an
author when her poem caught the eye of her second grade teacher. In middle
school she spent her free time locked in her room, writing her first young
adult novel. Though her social life suffered, her love for literature thrived.
She studied English at Eastern Michigan University, where she veered from
writing and earned an education degree. She spent nine years teaching high
school English. Currently she is a school counselor, doing a job that is both
one of the hardest things she's ever done and the most rewarding. In her free
time she writes, reads great books and takes care of her two beautiful and
crazy children. She is a contributor and co-creator of Underground Book
Reviews, a website dedicated to erasing the boundaries between traditional and
non-traditional publishing. She lives in Michigan with her husband and two
children. You can find her at www.katiefrenchbooks.com.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

The Headmaster's Wife is a significant departure from
my other work. At Morrow, the branding of my career was based largely on
becoming, as one editor put it, Nick Sparks for the Volvo set.

I was writing full time then and there was pressure to
produce books that fit this model. In 2007, the year my last book was
published, I began an effort to save a historic college campus and three
nationally acclaimed MFA programs and create a new college. This effort was
successful and today Vermont College of Fine Arts is widely recognized as one
of the leading graduate institutions in the arts in the country. My position as
the founder and the president gives me a wider platform than I have ever had
for my work in the past. Because of the nature of the job, I was able to take a
deep breath and reconsider my literary career and the kind of work I wanted to
do.

In 2009, my wife Tia became pregnant with our second child.
A routine ultrasound in her 23rd week of pregnancy changed everything. The
placenta had attached in a difficult place and somehow had created a leak of
amniotic fluid. We were told Tia would not leave the hospital until the baby
was born and that could happen any day. The challenge was to hang on as long as
possible to give the baby a reasonable chance of survival. Tia was on bed rest
in the hospital for three weeks while I ran a college and took care of our
three year old at home. Our daughter, Jane, was born at the gestational age of
26 weeks, and weighed one pound 14 ounces. She was immediately put on machines
to help her breathe. We began our vigil.

For the next six months my wife and I took turns living in the hospital. I
spent day after day next to Jane, reading to her, talking to her, and she was a
miracle. She grew. She learned to smile. She had warm brown eyes and my face.
But her lungs were in tough shape. The same machines that had saved her were
ironically killing her as she developed BPD, a lung disease that comes from
prematurity. But even with her on the machines we could hold her and there were
days when it didn't seem like she was going to make it, and then days when we
had conversations with doctors about what it would be like when we got home.
How this would all be a bad memory, a story we could tell about this tough
little baby who fought like hell to live. It was during this time that I began
the book that would become The Headmaster’s
Wife. I wrote next to her bed in the NICU and for the first time I felt
like I was writing honestly, though I don't know how to explain that fully. I
wasn't writing with an audience in mind, or anything like that--I was simply
going deep into the mind of my characters and I was writing this book for Jane.
I was writing what I felt as a father. Eventually we made the difficult
decision to transfer Jane from Dartmouth Hitchcock in New Hampshire to
Children's Hospital in Boston where one of the leading specialists in lung
issues resides. Jane lived one more month and died peacefully in her mother's arms.
There is no way to describe what it's like to lose a child and I could not in
normal ways –except that this book became a response to her life and our grief.

People cautioned us after Jane’s death that these things can
tear apart a marriage.

We had been an amazing team for six months – My wife
taking care of Jane, learning everything she could, doing everything she could
to make her life seem normal. I was the tireless advocate, reading the New
England Journal of Medicine and everything I could get my hands on. Becoming
the first parent in the 30-year history of the NICU at Dartmouth to run the
weekly Doctor's meetings. After Jane’s death we were in a fog for six months.
We knew someday we would come out of it and we were determined to stay
together--which we have. But I began to ask the question: what if we fell
apart? I began to rewrite the book with this question in mind. When I finished
this novel, I knew I had something very different than my previous work. It
required a different approach to my literary career. I replaced my long time
agent Nick Ellison who had a more straight commercial focus with Marly Rusoff.
This book is five years in the making. It will be dedicated to Jane and all the
nurses at Dartmouth Hitchcock who became part of our family.

“Greene (Mirror Lake;
Envious Moon) has created a brilliant, harrowing novel depicting the
spectacular unraveling of a once distinguished and proudly successful man. He
has also conceived one of the most convincingly drawn unreliable narrators that
readers may ever meet, a character recalling the creations of Edgar Allan Poe…Essential
for fans of literary fiction.”

– Library Journal

“The book is, at its core, a trenchant examination of one
family’s terrible loss and how the aftermath of tragedy can make or break a
person’s soul.”

– Publishers
Weekly

“…this is a moving testament to the
vicissitudes of love and loss, regret and hope.”

–Kirkus Reviews

“A truly remarkable novel, I read the
second half of The Headmaster’s Wife with my mouth open my jaw having
dropped at the end of the first half. Thomas Christopher Greene knows how
to hook a reader and land him.”

– Richard
Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls

“An accomplished and artful
storyteller, Greene has surprises in store as he unspools

a plot that becomes as poignant as it
is unpredictable.”

–Wally
Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of TheHour I First Believed

“I devoured this book. Both
psychologically complex and wickedly fast-paced.”

–Julianna
Baggott, NewYork Times
bestselling author of Pure

Author bio:

Thomas Christopher Greene was born and raised in Worcester,
Massachusetts. Tom has worked in a staple factory; as an oyster shucker;
a speechwriter and spokesperson for a presidential campaign; the
director of public affairs for two colleges; and as a professor of
writing and literature. In 2006, Tom founded the Vermont College of Fine
Arts, a top New England arts college, making him the youngest college
president in America at that time. The Headmaster's Wife is Tom's fourth
novel.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

We all have
our favorite authors, but have you read any of these authors? These are some of
the best stories I've read and they all have new releases this month. I've done
reviews on many of their books which you can read in the right sidebar under 'My Reviews.' So in no particular order, take a look at these fabulous new releases:

DEAN BRECKENBRIDGE:

Book Blurb:

Wolf's friend
Gordy needs help. He's being blackmailed for a 25-year-old murder that he
claims he didn't commit. But somebody else insists he did, and they're going to
murder his son in reprisal. Wolf races to stop the mayhem only to learn that
his friend hasn't told him the whole truth. And the lies could get him killed.

Wolf returns in this follow-up to THE KILL FEVER, THE DARK and THE RED RUBY
KILL that will leave you breathless.

Theda wakes from her torturous
session with the beast to discover she has been institutionalized by Ezekiel.
He says it's to keep her safe, but she's been through his versions of safety
before, and just barely lived. Now the beast has her where he wants her and
offers her his freedom in exchange for information—information Theda suspects
she will have to die to protect — even from the pale rider.

Hidden in New Mexico’s Black
Mountains, Test struggles to find the peace that his haunted past prevents.
Though Alyssa and Cliff stand with him, and though he’s blanketed by the
serenity and tranquility of the forest, he cannot quell the inner turmoil that
plagues him.

Meanwhile, on the other side of
the country, the last of the Reapers are plotting to avenge the death of their
master. Woefully out-numbered and hoping to even the odds, Casper and Ashley
have stolen a biological weapon unlike the world has ever seen. Their mission:
mold the weapon for their purpose and eliminate Test along with the remainder
of the rogue Shadows that side with him.

Readsy's Best Book Blog 2017

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